It is well established that domestic abuse can increase and intensify when women are pregnant, and when they have very young children. We also know that this can have a significant impact on the mother-baby relationship and on the developing child. However, we don’t have a very good understanding of  how best to support women and babies, through this very challenging time.  We  are Jane Callaghan and Fiona Morrison, researchers at the University of Stirling. We have been asked by Women’s Aid to build a training toolkit for domestic abuse specialist workers. This toolkit will help workers to develop knowledge and skills to support women who are pregnant, or who have very young children. To help us make sure that this toolkit is really relevant for you, we would like to invite you to take part in an interview about your experiences of supporting women who have experienced domestic abuse, and are pregnant or babies / children under three. We would like to understand what support you think women and babies need, what support is available, what has worked well when you have supported this group of women and children, and what barriers or problems you have encountered in this work.
Who can participate?: Professionals and volunteers who work with survivors of domestic abuse and who have experience of supporting women who are pregnant or have children under 3.

How to participate: There are two ways to take part. You can either complete an online survey, or you can be interviewed confidentially by one of the two researchers (Jane Callaghan and Fiona Morrison, at the University of Stirling).

Taking part by online survey:  You will be given some questions to answer. These are open ended questions and you can write as much or as little as you want to.  You do not have to answer all the questions if you don’t want to. The link for the survey is here: https://stirling.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/supporting-women-in-pregnancy-or-with-babies-under-three-

Taking part by telephone: You can email the researchers by contacting Jane Callaghan (jane.callaghan@stir.ac.uk ) . We will send you more information on the study, and will book a time that suits you,  to talk to you on the phone.